Sweet Talkers: how phone sex changed my writing

I ran a phone sex business for a year and that means I interviewed then trained operators, ran the payroll, wrote sex-talk skills-building bulletins, and I worked over a thousand hours on the live party line. There’s no debate it is the cleanest form of direct sexual commerce. Phone sex is disembodied, you aren’t YOU but there are real people involved. Tele-erotic performance is sex radio in that you can be a personality, a familiar presence, for faceless listeners. I’ve faithfully recreated the sense of abandon and comraderie in Sweet Talkers (Words from the Mouth of a Pay-to-Say Girl). Today, I want to explain how that experience shaped my choice to produce erotic-sexotic books.

The Sweet Talkers verbal exchanges were mostly cheerful, sometimes ridiculous, and very frank; there was an exchange of pure fantasy because neither side was bound to facts. It was in these moments with men that I grasped a truth about communicating about arousal. I refused to limit myself to the ‘ohh, baby, ohh, baby’ litany and, instead, rattled them with odd associations about notching crotches and getting theglide. I feared I’d be turned off by this parade of aural-pleasure seekers but it turns out they’re just all the guys I already knew: the jokester, the flatterer, the braggart, the nerd/jock/loner. I learned what they wanted. They wanted contact. They wanted options. They wanted possibilities. They weren’t (all) looking for cum dumpsters. I realized I didn’t have to over-explain things; they were glad to go with the flow, grateful when I paced them to a shuddering end. Young and old, these guys had stacks and stacks of images in their heads but they needed connectors, they needed lines drawn and circles formed, I gave them angles.

I always stake the territory: phone sex is about masturbation. If you don’t admit that, you miss the point. I not only talked to the callers, I heard them interact with other operators and with each other. I asked for feedback from the operators on what worked and what didn’t. I came away with a refreshed sense of men’s self-containment. Strip away the sexy sounds and masking murmurs and you learn it is their intent to spank that fucking monkey!

I took sex-positivity from the sweet talking conversational realm to the written realm. I had tuned my ear to pithy sex talk, figured out how to layer meaning between, around and beyond the lines. Most importantly, I allowed dialog to develop from two sides of an agenda. I learned this: men celebrate the simplest things. They really are pleased by a perfect throw, a higher jump, a copious come.

It’s my pleasure to present witty, wicked writing of the sexplicit sort. My specialty is setting scenes for you, inviting you to consider a kaleidoscope of situations.